Participation in these workshops will provide you with an opportunity to receive instruction from some of today’s most prominent acting teachers. You will be challenged with different theatrical work methods that will empower you to expand your horizons in stagecraft. You will learn training and practice methods for accessing greater autonomy and personal freedom to render the notion of “Actor-creator”.

All the great traditions in the art of acting ultimately seek the inextricable fusion of two essential elements, i.e., to develop imagination alongside the actor’s internal Truth. Actors training in this manner develop their imaginational capacity and inherent body language, learning to deliver meaning beyond words and speech, sense and expression, while constantly pursuing new relationships between their emotions and the elements constituting the situation. Exploring form, movement and song; harmonising the overall rhythm of the work with an actor’s internal rhythm; managing the intensities of situations and even… silence, which on stage could yield even more substance than words.

Actors should be open-minded and curious about other cultures in acting techniques and their associated theatre languages, since the future of acting, in lockstep with the evolution of the world and its cultures, will be based on syntheses and syncretism.

The history of acting is the history of such syntheses in movement. Even greatest masters of the stage, Molière, Stanislavski, Brecht, Michael Chekhov, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Stein, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Peter Zadek and countless others, were always and continue to be inspired by other theatrical cultures.

Today, there are also Masters throughout the world working from an alternative mindset and inventing these new acting syntheses, which warrant discovery and merit our understanding.

For our first workshop in July 2016, we have invited Professor Oleg L. Koudriachov.

Professor at the staging faculty of the GITIS in Moscow, Doctor of Theatrical Arts, Meritorious Artist of the Russian Federation and recipient of the Stanislavski Award, Dr. Koudriachov has worked with many large Russian theatres and is the founder of the “Third Way” movement. His work began receiving acclaim during the 1990′s with his celebrated staging of Mayakovski’s musical The Bedbug, which triumphed throughout Europe and shifted the limelight from numerous European professionals onto his proprietary acting techniques used to train his actors.

“We spend a fair amount of time laying the foundations of the learning process, or, simply put, on the training, which evolves relentlessly in terms of difficulty as we progressively build by adding acting elements of increasing complexity. The School by definition is a conservative pedagogic entity whose purpose is to preserve its traditions. At the same time, however, the School should direct its gaze onto the new forms breeding in contemporary theatre arts. The fundamental principles sustaining the work of an actor, i.e., traditions, are not easily put into balance with the fluid and ever-moving impulses of our contemporary reality in theatre. This is nevertheless exactly the work that must be done, since new ideas, original images, novel perceptions and fresh concepts crop up with every new generation. The modern theatre has as much of a need for new directors as new actors trained and imbued with the freshness of today, actors who are supple, alert, surprising, sharp witted and endowed with a broad array of techniques and capacities for expression. However, beyond new capacities of expression and adaptation, the essential remains: a living presence on the stage regardless of the complex form, with varying degrees of freshness or even enigmatic, of the manner of expression.” – Oleg L. Koudriachov